In College Park, you can hear a mix of cheering and moaning, depending on whether you’re attached to Maryland being in the Atlantic Coast Conference or anticipating its move to the Big Ten. In the Big Ten’s headquarters, that’s giggling and giddy hand-clapping as they got one of the programs and markets it’s coveted for the last two years.

But what’s that sound coming from the ACC’s headquarters, on the day one of its charter members hits the road?

Those are chickens coming home to roost.

What the ACC reaped in 2004, it now sows. Before the Big Ten and Pac-12 and SEC cut their various swaths through the college sports landscape, the ACC pretty much invented the concept of the “super-conference” as it exists today. It did so by stripping the Big East for parts.

Eight years later, what’s left of the Big East has to be dripping with schadenfreude, secretly enjoying a huge brick unexpectedly falling out of the ACC wall—with most everybody expecting Maryland to be only the first one. This might be the start of the ACC disintegrating piece by piece, maybe not exactly the way the Big East did, but maybe not that far from it, either.

It’s easy to forget today that the blueprint for what the Big Ten is doing to it now by snatching away Maryland, was drawn up by the ACC. The conference roulette of the last two years has followed that plan. The Big Ten beefed itself up. So did the Pac-12 and the SEC. The Big 12 and Big East, among others, were picked over and left to rot in the desert.

Every move the ACC made during that time was intended to make it poach-proof. They wanted it both ways. They wanted to lure what they needed and safeguard what they already had. All the strengths built over the decades, mainly on the backs of basketball and most of that with the North Carolina-Duke tag team, would stay, and football powerhouses and built-in rivalries and a championship game and a piece of the BCS pie would lay down an even stronger foundation.

They’d keep taking and never have to give. They’d keep gaining and never lose. The door swung one way: anyone was welcome in on the right terms, but no one would have a good reason to go out. They’d be the targeters, never the targeted.

It couldn’t miss.

Until it did.

The whole re-shaping the landscape business came back to bite the ACC. It’s not so much that the league is weaker today with Maryland gone, although it’s certainly not better off. It’s that losing Maryland unmasks the vulnerabilities already there—ones that the ACC’s proactive moves were supposed to hold off.

Obviously the ACC never became the football mega-power it had expected to become once Miami—and, to a lesser extent, Virginia Tech—joined up. It never locked down a television deal in the ballpark with the ones of the Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC and others.

Plus, no one who has watched the league over the decades can deny that it has declined in basketball, its calling card, since the expansion. Even as it strived for stability lately, the best solution many saw to the growing North Carolina-Duke hegemony was expected to be … yes, Big East transplants Syracuse and Pittsburgh, rather than the existing programs.

Oh, there were high hopes in the next couple of years for resurgent N.C. State and Maryland and their fresh blood at head coach. Slice that in half now.

And the desirable football programs just got more desirable. Florida State, Clemson and, once again, Virginia Tech surely have their ears open now. As for Miami? On the same morning Maryland took the leap, the Hurricane program banned itself from another bowl game.

Maybe the rest of the ACC sports programs will catch a quick and nasty hepatitis bug, but other than that it would be hard for the league to have a worse morning.

The great irony of it? If the ACC as it once existed falls apart, what’s left will look an awful lot like the old Big East. Odds are that it might be as viable and relevant as the current Big East, too.

The ACC now has some patching up to do. Connecticut supposedly is on deck to replace Maryland, for what that’s worth—probably not a ton under the current market conditions.

Conditions, let’s remind everybody again, that the ACC helped create in 2004 when it began turning a rival conference into the shell it is today.